Navigation

Wednesday, 1 June 2011

Is the (perceived) mighty Mac about to fall?

With the recent MacDefender scareware “attack” causing a fair amount of panic throughout the Mac World of users, I thought I would weigh in with a thought or two.

I have only been exposed to Mac for a short time being primarily focused on PC for the last 15 years. I did not bother to pursue an interest in Mac mainly due to the price of buying a Mac, so I am not against Mac or pro PC, I just have more experience with PC. This is changing over time and MAC’s are becoming more affordable. They must be since they have outsold PC’s for the last couple of years.

The thing about Mac vs PC is that the users of a Mac or any Apple product seem to believe they have the best thing ever created. The common misconception being that Mac’s don’t get viruses and never crash! Mac’s can get viruses and often crash, sometimes worse than a pc but nonetheless they do crash.

The thing is, with PC’s outnumbering Mac’s by something like 16-to-1 does it not make sense if you are a ‘hacker’ to design your payload to affect an operating system that is the most commonly used throughout the world? Since Mac’s are now selling faster than PC’s their market share is rising therefore so will the interest of hackers in developing malicious software crafted for Mac.

If the players were reversed and Mac had the lion share of the market and PC’s were coming into their own, would we not be having similar issues from the PC users “suddenly” realising that their once fabled PC is not invincible?